The Witness Chronicles May 19, 2023
Writing about Russia, AI scenarios, politics goes off the rails
First of all, nothing here or anywhere in my newsletters is created by or with the help of AI. This issue of The Witness Chronicles, examples of my recent writing from Medium, looks at why I won’t use AI, the sorry state of politics in America, and why speculative writing about Russia is just that, speculation, not facts.
As usual, be forewarned: I come at things from a liberal and moderate Democrat point of view and these are my opinions and observations. Let’s keep things civil please!
The Witness Chronicles is a production of The Grasshopper.
Writing About Russia is Like Staring Into the Sun
It’s blinding. And no one really knows anything
Misinformation and disinformation intentionally make it very difficult to write about the Ukraine war, and oppression in Russia, with any degree of authority. A lot of Medium writers have made it their bread and butter subject. I write about it occasionally, but like most of my writing here, it’s opinion and to some degree conjecture.
I see a lot of this stuff in my feed, some days more than 50%, and I have a problem with a lot of it because the writers speak with an authority they don’t and can’t have. There are few facts out there that are verifiable as both sides use words as weapons to sow doubt and, in Russia’s case, to repress and alter history.
This isn’t just a Medium issue. You see it all over the news as one rumor gets out and starts getting rewritten by other media, picking up interpretations and rewriting them as facts until any actual facts can no longer be known for to be true
We see similar processes in writing about internal events in China. Both Russia and China, and other repressive regimes like Iran, use this information fog as a tool to keep their populations in the dark and scared. For those of us in the ‘free’ world, there is a kind of dark fascination with this particular form of propaganda, the creation of a state where no one knows anything for certain.
Unfortunately we are starting to see the first attempts at this here in the US. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a favorite subject of mine because I consider him the most dangerous public figure in the country right now, is leading the charge. He knows the oppression playbook used so effectively in the countries mentioned above. Censorship, book banning, rewriting history, restricting educators, and limiting access to information on all kinds of topics.
As a writer, these actions horrify me and I feel they need to be called out for what they are, the actions of a despot which should not be underestimated. This particular despot, like his counterparts and mentors Putin and Xi, appears to have no sense of humor, just relentless and vindictive ambition.
It is one thing to try to scry the tea leaves of rumor in a country we know is repressed. It is another when we see it happening next door in our country, where the First Amendment of our Constitution declares freedom of speech as our core value, the one that drives all the others.
That value is so important that we extend it to those who spread hate, bigotry, and even violence in their speech. Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled that social media platforms are not responsible for the impacts of things people post on those platforms. I don’t much like that but it is a ruling that helps maintain that freedom that is so important to all of us.
Without it, we will have to start writing about our own country the way we write about Russia today, writing based on rumors, leaks, and conjecture without authority. That would be a great tragedy, the beginning of the beginning of the end.
Finally, if you write about Russia please present your stories as what they are, possibilities, not verifiable facts.
5 Likely Artificial Intelligence Scenarios That We Should Consider
People are telling ChatBots to take independent actions
Today the CEO of OpenAI, the developers of ChatGPT, appeared before Congress and asked for regulation, an unusual step for a tech executive. My guess is that he has run a lot more scenarios than most of us and he sees things that scare him.
The writer and sci-if fan in me has been running some mental scenarios of my own and there’s no reason why any of them can’t happen and probably are. Correct that, they are definitely happening.
The first one involves financial markets, stock option trading for example. Chatbots are great ways to learn from complex datasets in seconds and markets are extremely complex datasets. I can imagine a speculator setting up an account and authorizing AI to use it. He works with the AI to develop an algorithm to maximize returns on a set of options actions.
He funds the AI and tells it to do whatever necessary to get those returns, with no consideration of the stability of markets. We can imagine the potential results. Of course there are trading systems that are extremely sophisticated that do just that, but now we have tech that anyone can access at almost no cost and order to do things that safeguards in other systems are designed to prevent.
Bear in mind that speculators can profit from market crashes.
We have already seen music being created using the voices and styles of major stars. And they have seen rapid success with a Drake clone getting millions of plays before it was taken down.
Part of that regulation being called for calls for a major revision of copyright law to protect creators. The problem with that is passing changes to those laws can take forever, especially when the problems being regulated are things we have never conceived or imagined prior to now.
Canadian pop star Grimes had what may be the most pragmatic response I’ve seen from an artist. She invited AI users to use her voice if they split any money made with her.Â
There is a lot of speculation about AI becoming sentient, but that is not the case right now and we can’t imagine how that can happen, as we don’t even know why it happened to us. To clarify, sentience is the ability to feel and be self-aware.Â
It turns out that the fact that much of our nuclear technology is analog because the tech was developed before the advent of digital control systems, which means an AI cannot control many reactors and older nuclear weapons.
But it might be used to shut down an energy grid or a sales and distribution giant like Amazon.
I think the likely biggest scary use right now is flooding us with disinformation for all kinds of purposes. I’m quite sure many of the articles appearing here were written by bots and auto published to make incremental money. Why not put out thousands of such articles to make that incremental stuff add up to real money?
There is a lot of imitative and poor quality writing showing up that dilutes the reader experience. It could bury the work of writers who worked for years to learn to write well.
AI will be used to do wonderful things in areas like medicine, drug development, alternative energy, and a host of other things. But in every one of those areas it could go haywire and cause real damage, damage that may be hard to understand or rectify.
The reality of scenarios like these is that it’s too late. The decision to open access to this technology has been made and made with little consideration of its effect on society, an irresponsible act that cannot be undone.
Sam Altman’s appearance before Congress was a cry for help, but too little and too late. It was also an attempt to make himself into a victim of his own irresponsibility and to vindicate his choices. And it’s working. Congress members are tripping over each other in saluting his honesty. A tech guy who wants oversight?
A little note about that: Congress has been trying to figure out how to handle privacy in social media for years with no results. It would be ridiculous to think they can figure out how to restrict tech like AI that is potentially far more dangerous.
The future just got here and it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
American Politics Has Gone Completely Off the Rails
What do we look like to the rest of the world?
My original title for this was ‘This is the screwy week that was’. We have a few minor problems like the approaching debt ceiling debacle, the fact that surface water in the Gulf of Mexico is hotter than ever recorded, daily mass shootings, and Presidential candidates promoting fascism and white supremacy to willing followers.
The skies above my eastern city have been hazy with smoke from forest fires in the Canadian west, a phenomenon that is becoming a normal part of our summer weather patterns. But the really crazy things are what is going on with politics on the right.
Governor DeSantis of Florida’s censorship thugs are investigating a fifth grade teacher for showing her class a Disney movie with a gay character. He has basically outlawed any teaching of black history, or anything to do with diversity in a majority mixed race state.Â
Trump is bragging about an investigation he purports reveals a conspiracy against him regarding his contacts with Russians during his first campaign. The only problem with that assertion is that after years of work and millions of dollars spent the final report shows no conspiracy at all.
A GOP House committee leader declared he had a whistleblower who could prove the FBI did something bad, but now he says they can’t find the person. A guy who choked a mentally ill guy to death on a New York subway for yelling was charged with manslaughter and is now a Republican hero, despite the fact that the case has not progressed beyond the charging phase.
A guy entered a Democratic House Representative’s office and beat up two of his staffers with a metal baseball bat.
Rudy Guiliani was served with a lawsuit by a former female employee with a massive list of disgusting things this man did to her and then stiffed her for the million dollar a year salary he promised her. One of things she claims is that he was conspiring with former President Trump to sell Presidential pardons for two million dollars each.
Trump pardoned over 70 people. Whether any paid remains to be seen.
The governor of Texas wants to pardon a man who drove his car into a group of peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors, then got out and shot one of them to death. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
A group of Trump supporters in New Hampshire at a fake town hall laughed when Trump mocked a woman he had been convicted of sexually abusing in a verdict just the day before.
After Covid there was lots of talk about getting back to something called ‘normal’. That didn’t happen and now we live in the new normal and there is nothing normal about it. The current events I’ve listed above now seem to be just the news of the day, when any one of them would have been headline news only a few years ago.
There is a numbness going on here, possibly a hangover from the pandemic. No one wants to talk about any of this screwy stuff. Instead we stare at YouTubers like the guy who intentionally crashed his plane in the mountains after equipping it with cameras, all to get views.
Views.Â
I can’t help but compare this petty crap with the real views of Ukraine with bodies in plastic bags piled in ditches and blown out buildings that were once homes. The leader of a Russian mercenary army instructed his men to blow themselves up with grenades rather than be captured.
There is something fundamentally wrong with the world right now and I can’t get my arms around it. I write about this stuff every day and wonder when there won’t be anything crazy to write about, but it just keeps coming. It’s no wonder that the Biden White House announced a campaign to find out why Americans are so unhappy.
This is not a happy place anymore. Especially if you’re young, a time when the future should be bright and you should be full of hope. I’m older and I remember times when things seemed filled with potential. I still like to believe those times are possible. But I can understand why so many kids claim to be depressed most of the time.
I probably pay too much attention to the world, but I always have. Writers have to find people interesting or we’d have nothing to write about. I still do but I get the sense that there are a lot of people out there who don’t like a lot of people, people they don’t even know.
There is a concept called civility, the idea that we should be civil and community-minded as a basis for why we do what we do. There seems to be little civility in American public life these days. I miss it and so should you. We all need to be a little nicer to each other rather than living in fear and mistrust.Â
That’s it for now. See you on Sunday with a new issue of The Grasshopper.
Did you write today?
Martin
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